What makes this craving for the renovation of life into a perpetuum mobile is nothing but the discomfort at the intrusion, between one’s own misty self and the alien and already petrified carapace of the self of one’s predecessors, of a pseudoself, a loosely fitting group soul. With a little attention, one can probably always detect in the latest Future signs of the coming Old Times.
“
| — | Musil, “Pseudoreality Prevails,” The Man Without Qualities, page 138. This should have been accompanied by one of the recent photos of Rupert Murdoch discussing the Sunday edition of The Sun with its editors. |
